Maretta McDonald

Maretta McDonald is a 2022-2023 National Poverty Fellow with the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds a current position as an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Sociology, and will be transitioning to an assistant professor position in Fall 2023. McDonald’s current research interests are racial inequality, criminology/criminal justice, family, gender, spatial analyses, and public policy. Her dissertation, “Examining Child Support Enforcement in the Deep South: An Analysis of Race, Gender, Class, and Place,” examines the association of the agency’s policies and practices with macrolevel spatial and racial inequality, which brings all these areas into conversation with each other.

McDonald combines mixed methods with a practitioner’s lens to her research. She worked as a Child Support Enforcement officer and supervisor before entering graduate school. McDonald has successfully defended her dissertation and graduated from Louisiana State University with her Ph.D. in sociology in May 2022. McDonald also served as a 2021-2022 American Sociological Association (ASA) Minority Fellow and a member of the inaugural 2021-2022 cohort of ASA/NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant awardees. She has published her research in Sociological Perspectives and edited volumes. Her co-authored book, Sociology of Cardi B, is expected in early 2023 published by Routledge.